formats

Key Takeaways

• There were 12th straight quarters of ad experiencing and ad testing, with 234,000+ consumers opting-in for testing research.
• The research included controlled experimental design, biometric evaluation, longitudinal impact; A/B testing technologies, co-creation & ideation, focus groups & IDIs.
• The research showed that an appetite for AVOD was sustained by a premium viewing experience.
• NBCUniversal have created a suite of nine unique ad formats, e.g., a Solo Ad (which provides a single ad within an episode of a show); a Pause Ad (an obtrusive and high impact ad experience initiated by the viewer when they pause what they are watching).

Key Takeaways

• Consider the value of entertainment, through the creative experience, as the price of admission. The key goal is to have advertising encoded in the mind—an opportunity to influence consumer behavior.
• Consider the value of performance in campaigns that leverage this creative experience. Like the Heineken commercial starring Daniel Craig, who is constantly mistaken for his character of James Bond when he’s on holiday. Is this advertising or entertainment? Or both—signaling evidence of the value of creativity to earn brand growth.
• Using the date from their research, they have created their own CPMs based on an Effective Attention Second, which yields different plans than those they would get by maximizing reach with standard CPMs.
• The combination of creativity and empathy has the strongest relationship with earned advertising effects. Performance improves when advertising entertains—shows something new and has empathy for the audience, reflecting their world, their dreams and their challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Attention is “ready for prime time,” as Marc Guldimann (Adelaide) put it. It has risen to prominence in the industry’s agenda and expects it to spread into media mix modeling and programmatic. Attention, he believes, should free the industry from “invasive” attribution practices by giving advertisers confidence in the quality of the media they are buying.
• Jon Waite (Havas) was encouraged to see attention move from theory to practice for optimizing campaigns. He believes that the focus on attention would encourage publishers to improve experiences on the web, which, in turn, would lead to better results for brands.
• Mike Follett (Lumen) cautioned that there was still much to learn about attention in different contexts, flighting, frequency, differences between B-to-B and B-to-C, the role of creative and long-term effects. What he found interesting in Joanne Leong’s presentation (to which he contributed) is the possibility of developing models that can predict attention for any campaign.
• Publishers have come up with innovative formats to optimize for attention on television, according to Kelsey Hanlon (TVision).

There was some disagreement among the panelists about the prospects for an attention currency. Marc saw it as an “obvious next step.” Mike regarded attention as more of a buy-side “trading tool.” Jon said that it will become a key planning metric for Havas.